Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: George W. Bush

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 17, 2017:

Hans von Spakovsky

When Colorado voters learned that their state is responding to President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity’s request for voter information, nearly 3,500 of them deregistered. The Hill made it political, claiming that they “have withdrawn their registrations … citing distrust of the [commission].” The news outlet also allowed that many didn’t know just how much of their personal information was already open to the public and, for whatever reason, decided to exercise their right to privacy.

The request from the commission stated simply that each state, and the District of Columbia,

provide all publicly-available voter roll data including, if publicly available under the laws of your state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of Social Security number if available, [and] voter history from 2006 onward.

This was enough to trigger pushback and in some cases outrage at the obviously political overtones and implications of the request, in light of President Trump’s claim of voter fraud in the last election, and his selection of Hans von Spakovsky (shown) to the commission. Spakovsky’s initial appointment to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by President George W. Bush back in 2005 was contested by Democrats and his nomination was withdrawn.

Some Democrats are claiming a witch hunt is taking place, and an effort to keep illegals from voting. As Alex Padilla, the Democrat activist who is California’s secretary of state, noted:

They’re clearly reached their conclusions already and have set up a commission to try to justify voter suppression measures being made nationally. It’s pretty shocking, the data request of a lot of personal information. I can’t even begin to entertain responding to this commission….

If you want to do [Russian President] Vladimir Putin a favor, put all of this personal voter information in one place, online, on the Internet.

Another Democrat who is also upset is Kentucky’s Secretary of State Alison Grimes, also echoed the “voter suppression” scheme of Padilla:

We don’t want to be a part of an attempt to nationalize voter suppression efforts across the state. Americans didn’t want, unanimously, a national gun registry, and they don’t want a national voter registry.

She added that the commission was “formulated on a sham premise” and violates states’ rights to run their own elections.

To hear von Spakovsky tell it, it’s all about the 2012 study done by the Pew Center on the States: “The whole point of this commission is to research and look at all of these issues, the issues the Pew study raised.” That study claimed that America’s voter registration system is “inaccurate, costly, and inefficient.” It also said the system “reflects its 19th century origins [which] has not kept pace with advancing technology and a mobile society.”

Its conclusions included these:

Approximately 24 million — one of every eight — voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate;

More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters; and

Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.

Although the author of the study said it didn’t indicate voter fraud, “these findings underscore the need for states to improve accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency.”

The study, however, provided too great a temptation for the federal government to get involved — innocently involved, of course. Marc Lotter, Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, claimed that the request was innocuous, and von Spakovsky claimed that opposition to the commission’s request was “bizarre” because the request only asks for information that is already publicly available. But Lotter let slip that the information would be “housed through a federally secure system”, adding that “this is nothing unusual.” (Emphasis added.)

This is a variation on the theme: “Trust us; we know what we’re doing. Go back to sleep.”

Instead of having the executive branch of the government get involved with vote-fraud investigating, which is unconstitutional, David Becker, a Pew director, has already organized a joint pilot project involving eight states to try to make their voter lists more accurate. Said Becker: “What this system will do is it will take in data from the states who choose to participate … and it will be matched … [with] national change of address data from the Postal Service.”

Note the words “who choose to participate” as opposed to the innocuous “request” from Trump’s commission that comes with the unspoken threat of force. According to von Spakovsky, federal statutes already give the public the right to inspect publicly available voter registration records, adding that the attorney general can demand copies of records related to federal elections, if it comes to that.

How much better to keep the federales out of the matter altogether, and let Becker’s pilot program accomplish the same thing.

Perhaps Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann from Mississippi has the right idea. In response to the commission’s “request”, he replied:

They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.

The mainstream media, alerted to a Tweet President Trump sent early Wednesday morning indicating that he would nominate high-profile litigator Christopher Wray as FBI director, scrambled to find something negative to say about the choice. The best the New York Times could come up with was that he is a “hybrid pick,” whatever that means, but that the timing was suspicious: “Mr. Trump’s news may represent an attempt to inject credibility [whatever that means] into an investigation [that starts on Thursday].”

CNN likewise could find nothing negative in Wray’s background, so it, the least credible member of the MSM, focused instead on the timing,

With the withdrawal by former Connecticut Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman from consideration by the Trump administration for the position of FBI director, Andrew McCabe’s (shown) name is one of just four remaining names on the list. On Thursday Lieberman said he was withdrawing because of a potential conflict of interest as a result of being a lawyer in the same firm that is representing Donald Trump in the ongoing Russia/Trump investigation.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, April 12, 2017:

When Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), announced on Tuesday the lifting of the president’s hiring freeze effective Wednesday, he used medical terminology: “What we’re doing is replacing the across-the-board hiring freeze [the hatchet] and replacing it with a smarter plan, a more strategic plan, a more surgical plan [the scalpel].”

In his first full day in office, newly inaugurated President Trump announced a 90-day hiring freeze that applied to all executive branch agencies, to be followed by a plan from each of those agencies as to how they will be reformed to run more efficiently. Since his OMB director wasn’t confirmed until nearly a month later, that “reform recommendation” timeline has been pushed back to June for initial drafts and September for final recommendations.

The new timeline also fits with President Trump’s budget recommendations that include

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, April 10, 2017:

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Kevin Hassett as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors. Immediately, Glenn Hubbard, a neocon serving as a visiting scholar at the “conservative” American Enterprise Institute (AEI), piped up to laud Hassett’s nomination and Trump’s wisdom in selecting him for the position: “He’s not just a standard-issue really good economist, [Hassett is] someone who knows how policy works. The tax changes being considered are really aimed at boosting investment, so I think Kevin is exactly the right person.”

He’s the right person if Trump wants someone whose resumé includes stints at the

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, April 10, 2017:

One way to test a hypothesis is to apply it to the real world. Two renowned, highly-regarded, and elite-college trained economists did just that. In 1999 James Glassman, the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute (Harvard-trained with a BA in government), and Kevin Hassett, BA in Economics from Swarthmore and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. So sure were they about their prediction they went on the road to promote it, claiming that “stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground – to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.”

On December 31, 1999 the Dow stood at 11,497. A little over three years later the Dow closed (on March 6, 2003) at 7,673, a drop of 3,823 points, costing those who bought the book and took their advice one-third of their investment.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, April 7, 2017:

The beauty of the CRA, the Congressional Review Act, is that it provides a process by which an incoming administration can look back at the previous administration’s rules and regulations and repeal, neuter, or abandon those it doesn’t like. In addition, once a rule has been repealed, the CRA prohibits it from growing back again. Call it “Roundup” 2.0 for political weeds and unwanted grasses.

What’s remarkable is that, since its enactment in 1996 as part of the Republicans’ Contract with America, it has only been used once: by George W. Bush. Congress passed five CRA resolutions under Obama but he vetoed them all. For him, no government was too big nor any regulation too outrageous.

When Marc Short, Trump’s Director of Legislative Affairs, was given the mike at the White House press conference on Wednesday, he spoke at length about the president’s aggressive use of the CRA to turn back a few of the many hundreds of burdens applied to businesses by the previous administration. Before taking questions Short said:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, January 19, 2017:

Alexander Soros

According to Media Research Center (MRC,) Alexander Soros (shown), one of billionaire George Soros’ five children, opened his father’s checkbook and gave more than $4.5 million to various Democratic campaign and political action committees last year. Between August and November the Soros scion wrote four checks to Senator Harry Reid’s Senate Majority PAC totaling $3.5 million. The other checks went to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee Services Corporation, and other left-wing groups and politicians.

Although it’s George’s money, Alexander is making the decisions on a major part of his father’s estimated $25 billion. And it appears to be part of a plan to move Alexander into the driver’s seat when his father, age 86, passes from the scene. Dan Gainer, the MRC vice president who tracks the numbers, told the Washington Times: “Alexander Soros is following in both his father’s and brother’s footsteps — going left.” He added:

President-elect Donald Trump has named a longtime close friend as his “special advisor” on deregulation: multi-billionaire activist Carl Icahn. In acknowledging the honor, Icahn stated, “It’s time to break free of excessive regulation (see above) and let our entrepreneurs do what they do best: create jobs and support communities.”

Icahn started as a stock trader and then moved into a position where he could

The joint U.S.-Canada statement issued by the White House on Tuesday permanently blocked 115 million acres of the Arctic Ocean — including all of the Chukchi Sea and the vast majority of the Beaufort Sea — from energy development. Said the statement:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 30, 2016:

One of the first criticisms over Donald Trump’s nomination of former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday for Treasury secretary came from the Democratic National Committee: “So much for draining the swamp … nominating Steven Mnuchin to be Treasury Secretary is a slap in the face to voters who hoped [Trump] would shake up Washington.”

Just the name “Goldman Sachs” sends shivers down the backs of Americanists.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 30, 2016:

President-elect Donald Trump picked Elaine Chao shown) for secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation on Tuesday, raising concerns about her connections with the Republican establishment as well as China. Some of those concerns are balanced by her affiliations with pro-freedom and pro-free market organizations.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 16, 2016:

The long war against guns continues. When District Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis dismissed the lawsuit last month brought against Remington Arms by families of victims following the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the plaintiffs’ attorney said they planned to appeal. That appeal was filed on Tuesday with the Connecticut Supreme Court.

Bellis had dismissed the original suit in light of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005. In her opinion she wrote:

On Friday Fairfield (Connecticut) District Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis dismissed the lawsuit filed in January 2015 by families of victims murdered by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, three years earlier (see memorial above). They hoped to use a legal loophole involving “negligent entrustment” as a way to get around Congress’s intent to protect the gun industry from frivolous lawsuits: the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).

The act, prohibiting civil liability claims against not only gun manufacturers but also

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, August 30, 2016:

In Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary race in Arizona, incumbent John McCain is projected to crush his opponent, Kelli Ward. And he leads his likely Democrat opponent in the general election by double digits. Lesson: It’s helpful to learn the political two-step in order to stay in office for 34 years.

In July, Ward ran an old Romney attack ad against McCain which claimed that

A snippet from Donald Trump’s conversation with CNBC on Thursday raised the ire of numerous media commentators, who called Trump’s plan “unprecedented” (CNBC), “fanciful” and a “threat” (New York Times), and “tantamount to a debt default” (Yahoo Finance). Others called his remarks “reckless,” while Tony Fratto, a former Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration said, “This isn’t a serious idea — it’s an insane idea.”

What sparked the ire? The initial impetus was when Trump said, “[The U.S. Treasury is] paying a very low interest rate. What happens if that interest goes up two, three, four points? We don’t have a country. I mean, if you look at the numbers, they’re staggering.”

Indeed they are. The U.S. Debt Clock shows the national debt closing in on $20 trillion, while the economy is slumping along, with a GDP at just over $18 trillion. Put another way,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, April 20, 2016:

As expected, both leading candidates in the Republican and Democratic primaries in New York on Tuesday extended their leads over their rivals. Hillary Clinton took 135 delegates to Sanders’ 104, all but cementing into place her nomination at the Democrat convention in July. Donald Trump extended his lead over his nearest rival, Ted Cruz, by running the board, taking 89 delegates to none for Cruz.

The list of allegations against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is about to get longer. On Thursday a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals not only turned back an appeal from the IRS that providing a list of Tea Party groups it targeted would be “unduly burdensome,” it also denied a request that sanctions be applied to a lower court judge who ruled against them last year.

Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, attended a town hall meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, on Wednesday featuring Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush. According to York, the meeting was a “downer,” with family members ranging from older brother George W. Bush, his mother Barbara Bush, his sister, another brother, along with Jeb’s wife and children, all behaving as though they were attending a wake and not a celebration.

In South Carolina, where George H.W. Bush (1988) and George W. Bush (2000) sealed the deal for their presidencies, younger son John Ellis Bush (JEB) is failing and flailing. The average of all polls published by Real Clear Politics shows Bush